(From June 6-17, SSI will be highlighting the winners from April’s SAMMY Awards. Protection 1 won the SAMMY for the Best Broadcast Advertisement.)
Protection 1 knows how to play the broadcast advertisement game like a pro. The Wichita, Kan.-based company has seen tremendous success in recent years with campaigns around ESPN’s popular “Mike and Mike” (Greenberg and Golic) morning radio personalities, but complemented those somewhat lighthearted ads this year with an impactful, noncelebrity ad that truly hits home.
A company employee sent an unsolicited E-mail to management about the possibilities of sharing a personal story, and P1 Marketing Director Madolyn Wagner worked with a production company to bring the tale to the camera, according to Jamie Haenggi, P1’s chief revenue officer.
The 60-second ad, which can be found on YouTube and P1’s Web site, begins with a P1 employee talking about what it means to be a security professional, and showing him staking a P1 yard sign. We soon see the face of “actual customer” Carol Cushing, recounting her story of survival thanks to a P1 carbon monoxide (CO) detector installation.
“We were sound asleep, and at 4 a.m. the phone rang,” begins Cushing, “telling us to open the doors and windows because our carbon monoxide detector was going off. We couldn’t smell anything, we told her everything was fine. But she insisted on calling the fire department and said, ‘You need to get up and get out of your home.'”
The P1 employee in the monitoring center, whose “actual responder call” instructions to Cushing are spliced into the story as voiceovers, tells her they need to do a CO check. “When they came they found out that the furnace was putting out more gas than what it was burning, and our home was filling up with carbon monoxide,” Cushing continues. “We would have gone back to bed. We probably wouldn’t have woken up.”
The commercial cuts back to the P1 employee, who is now identified as Clint Cushing. In steps Carol as he says, “I love working for Protection 1 because we save lives. In this case, it was the life of my own mother.” A narrator then adds the tagline, “Give mom peace of mind with a new home security system from Protection 1.”
When the ad aired over a typical two-week run, adds Haenggi, the Web site received almost 44,000 impressions and 9,500 clicks, with 21.8% clicking on a specific link as opposed to just the ad as well.
